PURCHASE, NY.- The Manhattanville College Gallery of Fine Art announces its latest show, Off the Wall, featuring the works of four prominent contemporary installation artists: Michael Burke, Valerie Hammond, Lisa Mackie, and Vernita N辰ognita. Based in New York City, Vernita N辰ognita is a performance and multimedia artist, writer, poet, political activist, and artistic pioneer. Influenced by her study of the enigmatic system of Japanese dance and movement, her work is always a fusion of the material and somatic, the stuff of art and the physicality of the manipulator of that stuff, the product of which places evocative and exigent demands upon the observer.

In her installations, Valerie Hammond seeks to capture those parts of experience that are most profound and yet more elusive: the sacred and the psychic. Drawing her inspiration from consecrated spaces and devotional objects, Hammond captures in her work the fluidity and transformationality of the mysterious and metaphysical realms of the human condition.

Lisa Mackie works in collage: a collage of colors, textures, forms, dimensions, materials, and senses. Her pieces are not so much finished objects in and of themselves as they are invitations to consider the progressive paths which led to their creation. Her work dares the viewer to peer into the infinite, fractal-like array of possibilities that is the creative process.

Michael Burke, who brings to work years of experience from fields of astrophysics and urban planning, is an artist whose metallic creations seems to balance themselves precariously between the mechanical and the mystical, between the formulaic and the fantastical, and between the scientific and the sublime. His pieces challenge the observer to sidestep the either/or of these seeming contradictions, and to see the pure and powerful beauty that resides in the places where these concepts collide.